Monthly Archives: August 2017

By now, we know that email marketing is here to stay, and it will continue to contribute to the nurturing of your prospects, your customers, and profits for your business. However, email marketing campaigns could be extremely susceptible to flaws and failures. That’s why we put our clients’ email marketing programs on high alert to steer clear of common email mistakes. Sadly, some email mistakes are extremely deadly: they can cost the sender’s reputation while wasting resources and a portion of the marketing budget. However, no matter how common and dreaded are these, all email marketing mistakes are avoidable with proper planning and strategic execution.

Here are some of the most common email mistakes and how these can impact your business –

1. No ‘Unsubscribe’ button

Do you worry that a bold and visible “Unsubscribe” button may encourage your subscribers to back off from your email marketing campaign? The truth is the absence of one can harm your email program more, as recipients who are not willing to receive communications may simply report your email as spam! However, with a button strategically placed with the right call-to-action (CTA), your subscribers will feel no compulsion to continue receive your content and offers, knowing that they can leave and return whenever they wish to. Moreover, you can use an “Unsubscribe” page linked to the button, which you can use to get feedback on the reason a recipient might wish to exit from your list. This information will enable you to personalize emails more efficiently based on the data.

2. Not testing emails sufficiently

A/B testing is never an option but a necessity. We remind email marketers repeatedly to do this, no matter how pushed they are by the schedule. Many marketers may also mistake not testing their emails enough simply because they reveal the skeleton in the closet! Wouldn’t that be more fearful when emails will fail to perform as intended and show negative results? There are many areas that play the most essential parts of email marketing programs to be periodically tested. Open rates, hyperlinks and link texts, bounce rates, CTA, subject lines should be the top priorities amongst those.

3. No apology emails

Seeking apology will not put your sender’s position in jeopardy, whereas not sending one may tarnish your reputation. With an apology email, you can reduce the risk of repelling your prospects and customers on the event of mistakenly sending an incorrect, unpleasant or duplicate offer or information. These mails come exceptionally handy to clear the air in case you have sent an invalid or repeat the same offer to same customers, or present inaccurate information or insights, rub their sentiment wrongly – sending an apology email even before they spot the mistake will work a great deal in mending the mistake. So, do not skip these quick fixes of accidental email mistakes.

There are many more severe mistakes email marketers commit and make their campaign doomed to failure, and you may be making them too! Learn how every minor (you thought!) email mistake negatively impacts your campaign and reputation, and to what extent – and the best practices experts recommend to guard your campaign against them. Join in and hear our email experts sharing their best practice. Put your doubts to bed by joining us for

Our next webinar: Preventing the Dreaded “Oops Email” — All You Need to Know!

Many marketers consider direct mail to be an opportunity to enhance the performance and personalization of campaigns and to build trust. The Marketo automation platform gives marketers the ideal playground for that. With Marketo, they can automate the direct mail process with educational, informative, product updates, promotional, and many other different types of content. They can also add call-to-action phrases to their intended content to encourage recipients to register for a product demo, a meeting or a product query. The Marketo platform has plenty of features that facilitate sending automated direct mail campaigns to improve customers reach and influence purchase decision. But if you wonder how you can achieve all these objectives with email campaigns, then why allocate marketing budget for direct mail?

Why direct mail in an age of email?

Direct mail impacts engagement programs in a variety of ways –

Recipients tend to keep good looking cards and direct mail pieces, such as catalogs, gifts, or other items. They often may choose to display items or even share with their friends and family. Thus, direct mail presents better opportunities for engagement with the brand.

Physical coupons and gift cards with call-to-action in direct mail impact more in fetching customers to the store, thus, speeding up the purchases.

Direct mail delivers newsletters, cards and offers straight to the recipients and get noticed, engaged, interacted or take desired actions with your mails. Prospects find direct mails less intrusive and easier to engage with than electronic mails.

Direct mails can be synced with any online campaigns – these can be automated, aligned with email, social and other online campaigns and optimized based on insights collected from previous purchases.

Direct mails make customers feel more valued and connect emotionally thus, making subscribers more charged up and responsive to communications.

Furthermore, many people not only want to open and engage with direct mail pieces, but many also want to receive direct mail more than email. About 70 percent direct mail recipients have expressed their interests in discerning content in their direct mail, while 74 percent recipients have shared that they noticed ads in direct mail more than any other online campaigns.

Now the question is – how to create direct mail campaigns that will improve engagement and responses with campaigns?

We recommend these four effective tips to boost the direct mail marketing efforts using Marketo:

1. Create the Program for the direct mail

First things first: create a Marketo program by adding multiple assets to support direct mail programs. We suggest creating following assets for direct mail programs:

First, you need to create ‘Members’ for subscribers who request direct mail by filling out forms. This asset will also include those who are expecting and interested in company’s direct mail programs.

Next, create a campaign to queue direct mails and ensure that they are automated with the right list of people.

Create another campaign to track all these direct mails sent. As well, you need to set the campaign so that status is updated as soon as the physical mail items are sent.

Create this campaign to track all direct mails that are successful. Here you can monitor the mail pieces received by subscribers.

After you have set up campaigns for automating and tracking received mails, you need another campaign to monitor recipients who are responding to your direct mails. Track recipients who are taking the actions guided by the call-to-action phrases in mail pieces.

Create a trigger campaign to trace those recipients who have proceeded to the funnel after receiving and responding to direct mails.

2. Identify people who can be mailed (who are not)

After creating campaigns, next thing to focus on is to define the list of people to trigger the direct mails. Because most companies and marketers will focus on email marketing campaigns, direct mail processes are not something they are familiar with. In this direct mail process, marketers need to make suppression lists for subscribers listed with invalid/incomplete/inaccurate email addresses. In order to ward off people with bad physical addresses, marketers can create a segment which will filter those people who should not be sent emails. Marketers who find segmentation difficult to handle, can opt for creating Smart List with Marketo to eliminate people with bad or wrong physical addresses.

3. Time to evaluate the nurture process in place

After you have zeroed in on the people to target, created the Smart Lists, segmentation, and assets, assess the nurture engagement program to decide where this direct mail program fits.

Now go into your nurture engagement stream and figure out when the direct mail should become part of your prospect’s nurture journey. This example leverages programs within nurture engagement programs, as many organizations do. In this example, PFL chose to make the direct mail the fifth piece of content.

Don’t worry, you can also send direct mail as part of standard Marketo flow steps if you aren’t using engagement streams.

4. Develop the Direct Mail Program

The most important element for creating direct mail programs in Marketo involves automating and queueing the program. You can line up multiple direct mails for lead nurturing program instead of just one current mail. The Queued email campaign allows sending an email and automating the direct mail in the proper intervals between email and other online campaigns. You can set email campaigns that will collect information on delivery of the package which may ask recipients such as, “Have you received the package? Tell us if you liked the surprise in the package” or contain similar other messages to generate interests of subscribers and also prompt them to receive and open direct mail packages.

In that way, you can create a combination of direct mail, email and other online campaigns as part of an evergreen nurture stream.

Do you need expert help creating direct mail campaigns using Marketo? Get best practices and make the most of your direct mail efforts. Contact our Marketo Certified Professionals at (408) 502 6765 or via social channels Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

We’d love to hear from you – kindly drop your query or tips on your Marketo nurturing program below in the comment box.

How do you attribute a value to the role that any particular marketing effort plays in the conversion of any leads or customers? This is one of the most frequently asked questions by our customers. Setting up this kind of attribution is one of the best practices they can follow to augment their digital marketing and advertising campaigns. However, owing to the intricacies of rules, types, touchpoints, values and other features of Marketo attribution, they fail to make the most of it and get utmost results.

In this complete Marketo attribution guide, our goal is to help you understand what Marketo attribution is, how to play by its rules, and how to make the most of it.

What is Marketo attribution?

Attribution enables users to understand which Marketo programs help to influence opportunities and sales, and even the role the programs play in helping move people through the sales funnel. It helps measuring the effectiveness of programs whether they are being used for generating sales or new names, and for improved decision making before investing resources, efforts and time in future programs.

Major rules of and functionalities of Marketo attribution are –

Marketo attribution helps monitor the impact of a range of programs on specific opportunities

To meet the criteria of attribution, the date for ‘Success’ or ‘Acquisition’ should be on or before the day a specific opportunity has been created or the date it has been closed.

Marketo measures attribution by taking account of the date a program first touches a lead or contact. That’s why the exact time an opportunity is created or won will be unrelated.

The contact record must have a ROLE or be the Primary Contact for the opportunity

The First-Touch (FT) attribution helps identify programs that qualify for acquiring new names which will boost revenues.

On the other hand, the multi-touch (MT) attribution helps identify a more complex program that is proven influential in shifting names in the in the sales funnel.

Acquisition Program

Acquisition attribution also enables marketers to add opportunity credit to Marketo programs that are appended with new records

All acquisition credits given to any specific opportunity, whether created or won, the records are get added to an acquiring program

Records are not required to meet success to be qualified for the acquiring program

Acquisition attribution will be a tiny proportion if too many leads are associated to a single opportunity that are acquired by different programs

Acquisition must take place either at the same time as, or before, any opportunity gets created, advances through the sales pipeline or if it wins revenue.

When an opportunity has been created before the record has been acquired, the program will not get qualified for an acquisition attribution.

The acquisition attributions are found as the (FT) in Marketo.

Success Program

On the other hand, the success attribution enables marketers adding opportunity credit to programs of which the records have met success

In success attribution, credit given to an opportunity is equally divided within all programs which have achieved success. The record doesn’t have to be acquired by any of these programs.

Success attribution can be considered small portions when a record reaches success in multiple programs.

This success attribution can also be measured as small parts when multiple records are associated to same opportunities which have already attained success in various programs.

In order to qualify as success attribution, the success must take place either on the day or before an opportunity has been passed to the pipeline or won revenue credit.

Successes attained by programs after the opportunity is created will not be given credit for sales pipeline

Success in programs the day after opportunity creation but before they are closed will get credit for revenue won

Success attribution is found as multi-touch (MT) attribution in Marketo

Do you often get into the dilemma when to focus on the pipeline and revenue then, use this small assessment chart will guide you through as well as how to use pipeline against revenue and vice versa.

Focus on Pipeline if you are –

Analyzing those Marketo programs that are created with sole purposes of demand generation. Those may include online forms, PPC, tradeshows and other events.

Scanning first-touch or acquisition attribution for the acquisition of new names.

If the buying cycle takes an unusually long time.

In B2B environment, if marketing activities do not have much impact or involvement in buying cycle.

If you are measuring the performance of your marketing teams based on the number of leads or on MQL values.

Focus on ‘Revenue’ if you are –

Analyzing Marketo programs, including emails, product demos and trial campaigns etc., that are created with the primary objective is to generate sales.

Evaluating the influence of campaign progress on records, multi-touch, or success attribution.

Interacting with a shorter sales cycle.

If your marketing activities have a significant influence on the sales cycle in a B2C environment.

Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing teams based on their contribution in revenue generation.

Do you need in-depth help and professional assistance in understanding, setting up Marketo attribution for programs and assuming the best practices to make the most of attributions? Then get in touch directly with our Marketo Certified Professionals at (408) 502 6765 or via our social channels at Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Watch for this space for more tips, help and updates, as well as winning techniques to set up Marketo attribution. In the meanwhile, we want to hear from you – so, please feel free to leave a question or story below in the comment box.